It’s well-known that the American food system wouldn’t run without immigrant workers—people born elsewhere, who now call this country home. When they aren’t on hand, or aren’t allowed to contribute, entire industries can quickly fall apart. The stories in our “Hands that Feed Us” series underscore this reality.

But immigrants aren’t simply a source of labor. On farms, in processing plants, and at restaurants, they’ve long been a source of political expertise, using their skills to organize and advocate for better workplace conditions.

This Labor Day, we wanted to run a story about that legacy. It’s about the broadly overlooked, under-recognized contributions that immigrants—specifically, Central American immigrants—have made to improve the American workplace, resulting in conditions that are safer, fairer, and more just for all of us.

In the United States’ heated national debate about immigration, two views predominate about Central American migrants: President Donald Trump portrays them as a national security threat, while others respond that they are refugees from violence.

Little is said about the substantial contributions that Central Americans have made to U.S. society over the past 30 years.

For one, Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants have helped expand the U.S. labor movement, organizing far-reaching workers rights’ campaigns in migrant-dominated industries that mainstream unions had thought to be untouchable.

Migrants and unions

More than 1 million Salvadorans and Guatemalans came to the United States between 1981 and 1990, fleeing army massacres, political persecution and civil war.

Since the 1980s, I have researched, taught and written about this wave of migrants. Back then, President Ronald Reagan warned apocryphally that Central America was a threat to the United States, telling Congress in 1983 that “El Salvador is nearer to Texas than Texas is to Massachusetts.”

Just 2 percent of Salvadorans and Guatemalans received asylum in the 1980s – so few that a 1990 class action lawsuit alleging discrimination compelled the U.S. government to reopen tens of thousands cases. Today, about 10 to 25 percent of their asylum petitions are granted.

Then, as now, many undocumented immigrants in the U.S. worked in agriculture or service industries, often under exploitative conditions. Unionization barely touched these sectors in the 1980s.

Salvadorans led Justice for Janitors to victory

Justice for Janitors began in Los Angeles in 1990. It aimed to reverse the wage drops that janitors suffered over the past decade.

Rather than do battle with the small subcontractors that hired cleaning crews for big office buildings, Justice for Janitors targeted the corporations that owned those buildings. Led by experienced Salvadoran unionists—some of whom had fled death squad violence back home—the movement used non-violent civil disobedience and strikes to expose exploitative labor practices.

Speaking out could be dangerous. Police once clubbed participants at a peaceful march through LA’s Century City neighborhood on June 15, 1990. Undocumented workers feared deportation.

But it worked. Janitors in LA won a 22 percent raise after their 1990 citywide strike, showing mainstream labor unions that even the city’s most marginalized workers—undocumented Central Americans, many of them women—had real organizing power.

In 1993, Guatemalan immigrants joined with Florida’s Haitian and Mexican farmworkers to form the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, a community-worker alliance that began in the basement of a local church in Immokalee, Florida. It used strategies common to Latin American protest movements, including street theater and socially conscious radio broadcasts, to unite Florida’s agricultural workers.

After five years of work stoppages, hunger strikes and marches, Florida’s tomato pickers won wage increases of up to 25 percent. A multiyear nationwide boycott of Taco Bell convinced the fast food chain in 2005 to increase the earnings of the farmworkers who supply its ingredients. Other fast food giants followed suit.

In 2015, the Immokalee coalition launched the Fair Food Program, an industry-wide agreement with Florida tomato growers to promote strict health and safety standards and allow outside monitors to oversee working conditions.

After five years of walkouts, marches and hunger strikes, the Case Farm workers in 1995 voted to join the Laborers’ International Union of North America. The company refused to negotiate, however, and the union pulled out of contract talks after six years.

Elizabeth Oglesby has been researching human rights and migration in Central America since the 1980s. She is co-editor of The Guatemala Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University, 2011) and Guatemala: The Question of Genocide (Routledge Press, 2018). She was an expert witness in the Guatemalan genocide trials in 2013 and 2018. She is a 2018 Public Voices fellow with the OpEd Project.